SparkReceipt Help

How to set up automations in SparkReceipt

Use automations to create recurring expenses or income, auto-assign details on matching documents, and steer AI extraction with custom instructions.

SV
Written by Sampsa VainioUpdated Jul 16, 2026

Automations let SparkReceipt do repetitive bookkeeping work for you — creating recurring expenses or income on a schedule, auto-assigning categories, payment methods and tags to matching documents, and applying custom AI instructions to your extractions. They run in the background; you set them up once and forget them.

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The three automation types

SparkReceipt supports three kinds of automations. You can create as many as you need (with one exception — see AI instructions below).

  • Recurring expense or income — Automatically creates a new expense or income document on a fixed schedule, e.g. monthly rent, quarterly insurance, or weekly client retainers.
  • Auto-assign details — Watches incoming documents whose merchant or payer name matches a rule you set, and overwrites fields like category, subcategory, payment method, and tags.
  • Custom AI instructions — Freeform natural-language rules that are applied during AI extraction. Available on the Elite plan only.

Where to find automations

Web app. Open Settings from the left sidebar and select Automations. You can also go straight to it at app.sparkreceipt.com/dashboard/settings?tab=automations.

Mobile app (iOS / Android). Open the main menu drawer, tap Account settings, then tap Automations.

The list view shows every automation in your account, with tabs to filter by type. Use Create automation (web) or the + button (mobile) to add a new one.

Recurring expense or income

Use this when the same document needs to appear on a regular schedule — rent, salary, subscriptions, retainers.

Schedule

Pick a frequency and the timing fields it requires:

  • Daily — runs every day.
  • Weekly — runs on the chosen day of the week.
  • Bi-weekly — runs every two weeks on the chosen day.
  • Monthly — runs on the chosen day of the month (1–31). If a month is shorter than the chosen day (e.g. day 31 in February), the document is created on the last day of that month instead.
  • Yearly — runs on the chosen month and day each year.

The schedule uses your organization's time zone, which is shown under the schedule editor. The background job that triggers due automations runs hourly, so a document may be created up to about an hour after its scheduled time.

Document template

You configure the document the automation will create:

  • Document category — expense or income, plus the category itself.
  • Merchant or payer name — the document's display name (required).
  • Tax mode — Total includes tax or Total excludes tax.
  • Tax kind — standard rate or GST + PST (dual-tax). For dual-tax you also enter a secondary tax amount.
  • Total amount, tax amount, currency.
  • Subcategory (item category).
  • Payment method.
  • Tags.
  • Description — free-form notes copied onto the generated document.

Each scheduled run creates a fresh document with these values. Subsequent edits to the automation only affect future runs; previously generated documents are left untouched.

Auto-assign details

Use this to keep documents categorized consistently when SparkReceipt scans them. The rule fires automatically whenever a matching document is created, and (for documents younger than 10 minutes) also on update.

Conditions

  • Document category — limit the rule to either expenses or income.
  • Merchant or payer name — the string the rule looks for.
  • Match type — Contains (case-insensitive substring) or Exact match (case-insensitive equality). Toggle the Require exact name match checkbox to switch between them.

Fields you can assign

A rule must set at least one of these fields:

  • Document category (e.g. switch from one expense category to another).
  • Name — overwrite the merchant/payer name.
  • Subcategory (item category).
  • Payment method (only for expense rules).
  • Tags — added to whatever tags the document already has.

Only the fields you enable in the editor are written; everything else on the document is left alone. If multiple auto-assign rules match a document, they all run, in no guaranteed order.

When rules run

Rules run on documents owned by the same organization user who created the rule by default; this can be changed to the whole organization in the editor. They do not apply retroactively — a brand-new rule does not rewrite documents you already have. To re-trigger a rule on an existing document, edit the document and save it.

Custom AI instructions (Elite plan)

Custom AI instructions let you write plain-English rules that are applied as a post-processing step on top of the AI extraction result. They can change categories, tags, descriptions, totals, line items, and other extracted fields.

This is the most flexible automation type — it can do things the structured rule editor can't, like "If the merchant is a restaurant, food court, or food delivery service, set the category to 'Meals and Entertainment'."

Plan requirement

Custom AI instructions require an Elite subscription. The editor shows an upgrade notice and disables the inputs if your current plan doesn't include it.

Configuration

  • Document scope — choose Expense documents, Income documents, or General documents. Only matching documents will run through the instruction.
  • Instructions — up to 500 characters of free-form text describing what the AI should do.

Limit

Each organization can have up to 10 custom AI instruction automations at a time. Once you hit the limit, delete an existing one to create a new one.

Tips for writing effective instructions

The in-app help sidebar (click the ? next to Instructions in the editor) has a longer guide. The short version:

  • Be specific. "Set the category to 'Meals and Entertainment'" beats "put it in the right category".
  • Use clear action verbs: "set the category to", "add the tag", "remove line items where".
  • Refer to fields by name (category, description, hash tags, line items, total amount).
  • For conditional rules, state the condition and the outcome separately.
  • Keep one goal per instruction — create multiple automations rather than one long instruction.

Example: "Tag all expenses from Amazon, eBay, or AliExpress with #online-shopping."

Activity log

Every automation has an Activity log that records each time it ran and what it changed. Open it from the row's overflow menu (web) or from the automation detail view (mobile). The log shows the date, what the automation did, and a link to the affected document, when applicable.

For recurring documents the log shows the document that was generated; for auto-assign and AI instruction automations it shows which fields were modified, or marks the run as no_changes when the rule matched but nothing needed updating.

Editing and deleting automations

Each automation row has an overflow menu (the three dots on web, or the row tap on mobile) with Edit, View activity log, and Remove actions. Editing a recurring automation reschedules the next run based on the new settings; the existing schedule is reset and recalculated immediately.

Deleting an automation is permanent. Documents that the automation already created or modified are kept as they are.